Qaddafi Discusses Energy Ties With Russia

By ANDREW E. KRAMER

Published: November 3, 2008

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the leader of Libya, visited Moscow over the weekend for talks on oil and natural gas deals, just two months after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was his guest in Libya. The visit here suggested that Colonel Qaddafi, a onetime pariah, is maneuvering to play Russia and the United States against each other for commercial and political favors.

During the visit, Colonel Qaddafi pitched a Bedouin tent in a Kremlin garden and invited Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin for tea.

On Sunday, Colonel Qaddafi flew to Belarus for a meeting with President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, a leader who supported the colonel during his period of ostracism, visiting Libya in 2000. Colonel Qaddafi was expected to end his first trip to the region since the fall of the Soviet Union with a stop in Ukraine.

Colonel Qaddafi, whom President Ronald Reagan once famously called ''the mad dog of the Middle East,'' is well on his way to mending ties with the United States and other Western governments after renouncing terrorism and efforts to build weapons of mass destruction. The trip showed he has not closed the door on former East Bloc allies.

''They want to say, 'Look, we have options,' '' said Alex Turkeltaub, a managing director at Frontier Strategy Group, a risk consultancy firm. ''This is a shot across the bow to the new administration in Washington.''

Russian energy companies have been offering Libya sweeping cooperation and investment programs. In a bold offer in July, for example, Gazprom, the Russian natural gas monopoly, offered to buy all of Libya's natural gas production in a deal that could help Gazprom corner the European natural gas market. Libya has been noncommittal.

Now, apparently in an effort to sweeten the deal with something the Untied States would be unlikely to offer, Russian authorities are negotiating to provide Libya with a civilian nuclear research reactor, though it was unclear whether the sides reached a deal on this issue over the weekend. In the part of Colonel Qaddafi's meeting with Mr. Putin shown on Russian television, the two sat in leather armchairs beside a bonfire, heedless of the cold autumn wind. ''We're becoming closer and closer,'' Mr. Putin said.

His visit followed a long courtship by Gazprom, the world's largest natural gas company, and the supplier of about 40 percent of the European Union's gas imports. For now, the North African nations of Libya and Algeria compete with Russia to supply gas to southern Europe. But Russia is toying with forming an OPEC-style group, the Gas Exporting Countries Forum, to eliminate this competition.

At the same time, Gazprom has been buying licenses to Libyan gas fields in joint ventures with the Italian company Eni and Wintershall of Germany. Both companies traded Libyan licenses for access to coveted reserves in Russia, in a sign of how highly Russia prizes the prospect of an energy alliance with Libya.

Colonel Qaddafi seemed to embrace the idea of closer commercial ties.

''Unfortunately, in the past our relations have been mainly focused on military and diplomatic contacts and there was virtually no cooperation in civilian sectors,'' he said at a Kremlin meeting with President Dmitri A. Medvedev. ''I believe that such cooperation is especially important in the current conditions.''

Military deals were not forgotten, however. Interfax, citing unidentified Kremlin sources, said the Libyans were in talks to buy $2 billion worth of antiaircraft missiles, fighter jets, helicopters, tanks and a diesel submarine.